little boy blue
by a simple space nerd
Summary: He fights like a boy possessed. Maybe he is, maybe all the ghosts of Kodos' victims rise up inside him, Desmia and Kit and Tam and so many others. But probably not. Probably, it's just James and the guards and a whole lot of anger that had been simmering under the surface since his brother walked away and didn't look back. (His brother, and his mother, and his father.)


**A/N: Hello! Thank you for reading my story. If you can spare a minute, reviews brighten my day significantly, and I _will_ reply. I hope you enjoy my writing and live long and prosper... xx**

 _ **Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I don't own any of these characters. I wish I did, though!**_

 _Little boy blue,_

 _Come blow your horn,_

 _The sheep's in the meadow,_

 _The cow's in the corn._

 _But where is the boy_

 _Who looks after the sheep?_

 _He's under a haystack,_

 _Fast asleep._

James Tiberius Kirk is only a week old and his mother still hasn't stopped crying. His brother, George Samuel, watches her from the doorway and pulls faces at James when their mother can't soothe him. Winona loves her boys, but she loved her husband more.

When James is three months old, his mother hands him to Sam, a tiny bundle of blankets, and tells him to stay quiet as the space shuttle takes off. Sam is four years old and has never been to space. (He doesn't want to go.)

James is a quiet baby, and he doesn't make a sound even as Sam clutches him tightly and watches Winona with wide eyes and a trembling lower lip. Sam wonders if space will eat him and his brother up like it did their dad. He won't dare ask his mother; Winona has been different ever since James was born.

(At first, she hugged James tight and whispered to him at night, treasuring her husband's last gift, but love turned into a petty hatred. Winona wants a refund. She wants her _husband_ back, not just his eyes.)

* * *

James says his first word, _"Sam,"_ as they sit on an empty deck. Sam grins a gap-toothed smile and James presses his hands to the glass and peers at the sky with his wide blue eyes. Sam stays far away; he still loathes the stars, but James has never seen anything else.

When James walks for the first time, it's in Sam's presence, and Sam beams. "Look, mom," he says later that day, sending James toddling towards her.

"Oh," Winona exclaims, fighting her weariness, "gee, James, you're growing up so quick!" Sam smiles even brighter.

"Yeah, Jimmy," he teases, unable to say Jamie due to his fading lisp. "You're _old_." Winona's comm beeps and she sighs regretfully, patting James on the head and gripping Sam's shoulder tightly before heading out of their cabin. James falls down and watches her go. Sam sighs.

* * *

When James is three years old, an ensign from the ship where Winona is currently serving finds him wandering in engineering.

She yelps in surprise, and James smiles toothily at her in response, before leading the young ensign on an exciting game of tag. He's used to wandering engine rooms; and she is not, but he's ecstatic to have a playmate. The ensign brings him up to Command Centre once she's successfully captured him, and James stares at his surroundings in wonderment. Winona doesn't want him up where she works, so he's never been.

When his mother catches sight of him, her face acquires an expression James already knows well; her lips go tight and her eyes hard. "What's he doing up here?" She asks, and the ensign hands the woman her quiet son in bewilderment. James sits on the stairs for the rest of the day, peering into the ink blackness of space, feet swinging, until Winona has been relived and sweeps him off to their cabin.

She is more annoyed with James than she is with Sam, even though Sam was _supposed_ to be looking after his brother.

* * *

Four months after James has turned five, Winona bundles her boys on another shuttle and they fly down to Earth. James chatters with the others on board, Sam frowns in the corner and watches him with his mothers' eyes until James asks him what earth is like and Sam dives into storytelling mode, weaving tales of tall green grass and blue skies and warm sun. Winona doesn't talk to either of them the whole way down, but they're used to that.

Uncle Frank is tall and wide and eyes his nephews with distrust as his sister introduces them. "They better not mess up my house," he warns, and Winona sighs. It's half her house, too, but she doesn't say that.

* * *

She only lasts a month before she's shooting off into space again, and James desperately wishes he could go with; not because he wants to be with his mother but because he wants to be with the stars. At this point, Sam and James are still SamAndJames, and James can still look to his brother when Frank drinks too much and yells at them for who-knows-what.

There's school, too, which James is excited for though Sam is not, and the teachers like him straight away. "It's those baby blues," one woman says, laughing, and James grins in the way that made engineers on spaceships narrow their eyes suspiciously.

James doesn't have many friends, even as the months pass, but he's okay with that. He's smart, he's _very_ smart, ( _too_ smart,) and so he reads books that he steals from the high-school library and teaches himself constellations.

* * *

James is seven and Frank has been getting worse. His mother hasn't visited for six months and that visit was awkward and so false it made James' teeth hurt.

Another thing that makes his teeth hurt: the way the other kids look at him when they figure out who he is. "You're George Kirk's son," they say. " _Wow_. What's that like?"

James shrugs. "I don't know," he says. He's only ever been one of _Winona Kirk's boys._ In space, up on the ships where James grew up, that's what people would say. Here, though, Winona Kirk is just another officer, and George Kirk is a legend. "Never really got the chance to find out." Their smiles fade and James sighs.

Sam is always angry and comes home with black eyes that he won't let James look at. "It'll get better, Sam," James pleads, ever the optimist, wishing Sam would let him call him Sammy like he used to. "No, Jimmy, it won't," Sam snaps back, and sighs when James flinches a bit at his tone.

James lies in bed and listens as Frank roars at Sam and Sam roars back.

Sam is gone in the morning, and a little part of James hopes he isn't gone for good because- well, no note, no sign, no nothing- he can't be gone, he's all James has. He writes a message for his mother and doesn't get a response. He doesn't let Frank see his tears.

Age seven is when James becomes Jimmy and Jimmy feels anger spark up inside of him, like his brother's legacy.

* * *

Jimmy is nine and punches a boy in the face when he calls him a coward. Frank yells at him, and Jimmy starts to yell back before he's even thought it through because he's so _sick_ of it all. He's too smart for the school, he's too mature for the other kids, he's too alone to talk to someone. That night, he has a stinging cheek and thinks _god, Jimmy, what are you doing, even Sam wasn't this dumb._

* * *

When Jimmy is eleven, his uncle hauls out all of George and Sam's old things and piles them on the dusty driveway. His first thought is _no way in hell would mom say he can do this_. His second is _no way in hell am I going to let him do this_.

It happens, though, and some sleazy pal of Frank's comes and dumps Jimmy's life into the back of a dusty hovercar and passes Frank some wads of cash that Jimmy knows will be spent on booze and not much else. Jimmy's fists clench and un-clench and he sees red.

If someone tells you he wasn't thinking straight, they're wrong. If someone says he didn't think it through, they're also wrong. James Tiberius Kirk knew exactly what he was doing as he jumped into his late father's prized red 1965 Corvette. Frank had claimed the car as his own, much to Jimmy's disgust, and Jimmy'd found the keys when washing it a little while ago. It's antique. It's shining. It's perfect.

It's just what Jimmy needs.

He leaps into the seat, starts the engine, and skids away from the farmhouse, waving at Frank's rapidly retreating form.

Frank's words are echoing in his head; _freak, good-for-nothing, no-one._

He turns the radio up, up, up, and whoops as the air whistles in his ears and stings his eyes. For the first time in far too long, Jimmy is free. Or at least, he's free until sirens are whining and there are cops on his table. But for all his genius, Jimmy decides to do the stupidest thing possible and ignore them, racing through Iowa fields as fast as he can, until he's heading towards the biggest cliff he knows of.

He contemplates what would happen if he just... let himself fall. If he followed his dead father's car off the cliff. He wonders what his mom would say; if Sam would ever find out. In the end, though, he jumps out at the last second and turns, grinning dangerously, to the officer who followed him. "Is there a problem, officer?" Cocky, arrogant, rebellious. The car smashes to the bottom of the ravine. Jimmy grins wider.

* * *

The officers don't really know what to do with him. Jimmy's fine with that as no one ever does, and he watches the two officers on guard as they play chess. He's tempted to call out all of their bad moves, but refrains from it simply because he's not in a cell yet and he'd really prefer it that way.

Frank storms in and Jimmy is kind of impressed that he actually bothered. He grips Jimmy's arm too tightly and Jimmy can feel the bruises already forming and sighs. The officers tell Frank that Jimmy is too young to face serious charges, but _something_ will have to be done. Frank leers and says _he knows just the thing,_ and Jimmy can feel his elation slipping away.

He shows up at the station two days later with a black eye, two fractured ribs, a broken arm, and blood in his mouth. "Get me outta here," he says shortly, and the officer on duty sends him a concerned glance.

They call his mom, who sighs like Jimmy has burdened him. "He's got an uncle and aunt on a new colony," she says, annoyed, "Tarsus IV. There's a flight headed there in two days. Can you get him on that?" The officer nods.

"Would you like to talk to your son, miss?" She asks, and Jimmy rolls his eyes. _Don't bother_ , he mouths, and Winona fulfils his expectations by giving a short _no_ and cutting the transmission. Jimmy shrugs. He wonders if Sam ever got off-world.

* * *

The ship is big and spacious and filled with people from every inch of the galaxy. Jimmy loves it. There's a nurse, who patches up his arm, there's a group of heavily tattooed pirates who are pretending not to be pirates, whom Jimmy teaches chess to, and there's an elderly couple that give him tips on how to break somebody's nose.

For the most part, he sticks to himself, wondering about his non-existent aunt and uncle, (George Kirk was an only child and he knows it,) and staring at the stars as they pass by. There's an Orion girl, Mira, who comes and sits by him from the second day on. She's two years older than him, and he suspects that he know what she's running from but doesn't say. (Jimmy grew up in space, and what may be relatively unknown on Earth is common knowledge in the stars.)

Jimmy draws his constellations and she draws hers.

When they land, a week after setting off, Mira hugs him and tells him to stay safe. He repeats the gesture and then walks off towards the two people carrying signs that say _James K_ in standard.

"Hey, Jimmy," The woman says, pulling him in for a hug, "You can call me Aunt Kay, and this here's Peter." She beams, and Jim extracts himself from the plump woman's arms.

"My dad didn't have any siblings," he says carefully, and the woman smiles cheerily.

"George and Peter were pals, back in the day," she says easily, not offering condolences or saying the words like they pain her, "when your momma called us up we thought it was the least we could do. 'Sides, you look like you could do with a change of scenery." Peter smiles timidly, letting his wife do all the talking, and Jimmy decides he likes them.

He's only got one bag, and has just settled in when the door slams. Kay's voice calls for him to _come on downstairs to see who's come home,_ but before he can, the door to his room bursts open and he's left staring at his wild-eyed cousin. Tam is short, tanned, and has crazy platinum blonde hair. His eyes are a bright amber colour, and when he grins Jimmy can see that he's missing his front teeth.

"Hey," he says easily, in all his nine-year-old confidence, "I'm Tam and you're Jimmy, huh?"

"Uh," says Jimmy.

"Is it true that you drove your uncle's car off a cliff?" Tam inquires, and Jimmy flushes defensively.

"It wasn't-" he starts, and Tam grins wider.

"That is _so cool,_ " he breathes, and thus a friendship is born.

* * *

Jimmy is almost twelve when he realises things are bad. (Though it doesn't look so bad, from the outside.) His school is actually challenging him, in all the best ways, his professors respect him and value his opinion, he's got friends, and he likes his "family". Yeah, the crops are wilting a bit, and yeah, scientists have been flocking into the academy with hushed voices, but that's normal, isn't it?

He starts to become fully aware of it when he realises how small meals have become, and how much thinner Aunt Kay looks now.

He doesn't say anything, but he lets Tam have half his meal when the wild boy complains.

"Ma," Tam asks thoughtfully a couple weeks later, "have you put us all on a diet?" Jimmy goes still, and Peter looks up slowly from his PADD. Aunt Kay breathes in and out before turning to face her son and plastering a fake smile on. "Yeah, Tammy," she says, but there's no hiding the tears that shimmer in her eyes or the tremble to her lips.

* * *

Three months after Jimmy turns twelve, everything goes to hell.

Everyone is herded into the city square, escorted by soldiers, whispering about the crops and the cure and maybe help has arrived at last?

Jimmy pecks Aunt Kay on the cheek (goodbye?) and heads through the thong to reach Mira and his classmate Michael, who are waving from where they lean on the side of a closed shop. (Something is wrong, wrong, wrong.)

Jimmy waved at Hoshi Sato, one of his professors and Aunt Kay's idol/best friend, and then a voice began to speak. "The revolution is successful." Jim didn't know it yet, but those words would haunt him for the rest of his life. "But survival depends on drastic measures." Mira sends him a worried look, and Michael steps forwards towards his worried family who were gesturing him over. "Your continued existence represents a threat to the well-being of society. Your lives mean slow death to the more valued members of the colony. Therefore, I have no alternative but to sentence you to death. Your execution is so ordered, signed Kodos, Governor of Tarsus IV."

Then the world falls apart.

* * *

Bullets are spraying through the air, red blood splatters up and down, people are screaming. Jimmy sees Michael crumple, a hole between his eyes. Soldiers are moving methodically through the crowd, and people have stopped struggling, _giving up_. (Jimmy will not. Cannot.) Beside him, Mira trips over someone's leg and doesn't get up again.

(Aunt Kay is lying face down, Tam's wide eyes unseeing. Peter is being pushed to his knees.)

A woman with blood running down her chin grabs his forearm and presses her little boy into his arms. " _Run_ , Jimmy," she says, and Jimmy recognises her as one of their neighbours. She locks eyes with him, and her son squirms a bit, Jimmy's arms tight around him. Jimmy doesn't nod, doesn't make promises, he runs.

Pressing through the crowd, which has fallen silent save for the shots that seem to echo in his mind. Another woman sees him, pushes her daughter towards him. Another, and another. (Jimmy can't take them all.) One woman presses her tiny child's hand into his. "What do you need?" She asks, and Jimmy is glad, for once, that his reputation has reached this far. (Little Jimmy Kirk, who likes to pick fights and doesn't know when to stay down.)

Jimmy looks at the little girl holding his hand, green eyes wide and scared. "A distraction," He says, hating the words but giving nothing away in his tone. The woman nods, smiles tearily at her daughter, and straightens up. (This is wrong, wrong, wrong.) She presses through the throng and Jimmy lifts the little girl against his chest, not looking back.

People are catching on, those who are still fighting, those not weeping or screaming. (They're almost there, almost there, just a little further.) From behind his shoulder, Jimmy catches a glimpse of the women and men of Tarsus rising up as one, holding hands and raising hell.

The two soldiers who are blocking his exit look over, frown, march off. Jimmy runs.

* * *

No one sees them go, scared children tripping over their own feet, fleeing the town drowning in red. They don't talk, and Jimmy slings the youngest girl onto his back and _runs_.

He can see the other kids, too, and he stays a step behind them, pushing them forward, ignoring the sharp dead grass that digs into his feet and the branches of the dead trees that cut his face. They don't look back and they run.

Jimmy catches sight of a little boy hiding in a tree, staring at his dead parents. They must have fought back. Jimmy lifts him down, legs burning, and they run. (The kid can't be more than six. This is wrong wrong _wrong!_ )

He loses track of time, but sees his kids falling behind. They're crying, shaking, running. He pulls them all into the dead forest, looking back for just a moment. They're crossed over miles and miles of the failed crops, and even now the rushes are folding back over where little feet have trampled them. ( _Fine time to start protecting your children,_ Jimmy thinks to the cursed planet.) The sunset is red. Jimmy looks away.

They don't run as far in the woods, and this time they follow him. (Don't step on the branches, he says, don't leave tracks.) He wishes the river hadn't dried up a couple weeks ago; they are all thirstier than usual and he needs them to be hidden. They need to disappear.

They all collapse when the moon is high in the sky, and Jimmy leans against a rotting tree trunk as he keeps guard. Their feet are bleeding, muscles aching, cheeks stained with blood and tears and sweat. The oldest there is Jimmy, at twelve. He sits watch. The youngest is Kit; only four. They are six children, but watching them as they fall into unconsciousness Jimmy wonders if they can even be called that anymore.

* * *

In the morning, one of the oldest, a third-generation-Vulcan girl named Desmia, asks what his name is. "JT," Jimmy says. The neighbours' son, Marcus, looks up but says nothing.

* * *

They eat leaves and try not to spit them out, and then they're running again. "I've heard of cliffs, just past these woods," JT says. "We can hide there."

It takes them two days to get out of the woods, and by the time they do their hands and faces and knees and feet are red, red, red. Desmia studies the blisters on her feet with a kind of detached interest. (Three of the six have already gone into shock.)

Of course, because Tarsus IV appears to actually be hell, when they find their way out of the dead forest they're met with desert. Faintly, far on the horizon, they can see cliffs and rock-faces.

"Come on," says JT, and hefts the sickly little Kit higher on his back. (She has a fever. JT is scared she'll die.)

They run, and when they can't run they stumble and hike and dig branches into the sand and gravel and heave themselves a bit further. The crossing takes half a day, and they're already one child short. A giant bird had come and swooped eight-year-old Heather into the sky, ignoring the rocks JT had hurled after it. Desmia threw up. Kit drifts in and out of sleep. (He doesn't know how much longer they can hold on.)

* * *

The caves are cold, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. They stretch far back, too, starting small and ending up in more spacious caverns. JT drills passwords and knocks into their heads, and then leaves Desmia on guard as he climbs up the (nearly-vertical) rocks and onto the dry plains, seeking out the farmhouses. (He doesn't know what he'll find.)

He scavenges for food and water, and finds meagre offerings, and tugs back two ratty blankets on the first day. Desmia almost cries. Marcus does. ("Save your tears," JT says. "You need the water.")

* * *

The second day he meets Tommy Leighton, who is on his knees and about to be shot. One of his warm brown eyes is missing, and JT kind of has to admire that the older boy is even still alive. JT is just out of sight, but he knows Tommy from the school and before he thinks it through he's bashed the two guards heads with rocks. Tommy stares. (He's fifteen.)

JT looks up at him, hands dripping. "You coming?" he asks, and Tommy nods, steeling himself, and piling the last of his dead family's food into a bag for them to take back.

There is an anger in Tommy's eyes that doesn't go out and drives him to dig out the kitchen knives and throw them into the bag too. JT watches and then nods haltingly. He understands that anger; it's been with him for a while. ( _"It's Thomas, now,"_ Tommy says, and JT gets that too. _"JT."_ )

Kit is looking a bit better, but JT is still worried she won't make it much longer. He slides a dagger into his hand and looks at it for a while, and when Desmia comes and sits next to him she grips his wrist tightly. "You did what you had to do," She says, and the blood caked under JT's nails seems to shine.

"I know," JT says. He's twelve and he's killed someone, and he feels _horrible_ , but he doesn't regret it. What does that say about him?

When all the little ones have fallen asleep, (Desmia and Marcus and Kit and Kevin and Vu'ash and Lana,) Thomas and JT help each other practice knife throwing. (Thomas used to play darts and hunt birds; JT's been getting in fistfights since he was nine.)

* * *

Thomas and JT go up and find more food each day, scrambling up and down the towering cliffs, Desmia stays and guards the cave. They prefer it that way, the little trio of children-turned-adults. (Desmia is only ten.)

A week after they found the cave, Thomas and JT hear a group of soldiers talking about a few kids they're supposed to be finding.

They leave in the night, Kit on JT's back, Kevin on Thomas's, and then they're running again.

Time passes achingly slowly and blurringly fast, and they keep running. (A month, a week, a year?) JT gets dangerously good with knives, fighting hard and fast and dirty, Thomas uses his hulking size to his advantage, and Desmia steals a guard's phazer. Kit dies, Desmia cries, and they have to stage a rockfall to bury her body so the guards can't find a grave. Lana asks for JT to teach her how to use knives. (She's _seven_.)

Vu'ash is next, his frail little body so thin that not even JT giving his rations up helps to restore life to the nine-year-old. JT stops grimacing at the blood on his skin. Thomas doesn't smile, his lips bleeding. Desmia stops telling the little ones stories about Starfleet coming to save them all.

Desmia gets shot and JT stops counting the number of people he's killed.

(As they run, more join their merry band and more leave.)

* * *

Thomas vanishes on a patrol. Kodos' soldiers start to wear old Starfleet uniforms to try and trick them. (It doesn't work. They stopped trusting Starfleet far too long ago.) Lana starts to join JT on food hunts, and then it all comes to an end.

They're cornered in, and there's a hole in the wall of the farm but JT won't be able to fit. He slides the kids through, smiles at Lana, and grips the phazer tighter. Kevin is crying, JT tells him to save his tears.

The guards are shouting and JT feels strangely calm, readying the phazer. It's set to kill, as always. If he's going down, he's taking them with. (And he does, he watches the guards fall down like puppets without strings, and when the phazer dies he pulls out a knife and slashes and cuts and he fights like a man possessed. Maybe he is, maybe all the ghosts of Kodos' victims rise up inside him, Desmia and Kit and Tam and _so many others_. But probably not. Probably, it's just James and the guards and a whole lot of anger that had been simmering under the surface since his brother walked away and didn't look back.) (His brother, and his mother, and his father.)

They hit his head, finally, and he wakes up in front of Kodos. He can't remember quite what happens next. He says something stupid, Kodos looks awfully human, and JT kills someone somehow, using a nail from the floor.

He comes to chained to a wall in a stone basement and laughs because this is too cliché. (He stops laughing when he is punched, over and over and over again.)

Kodos wants to know where JT's kids are. JT tells him to go to hell. (If Kodos is still asking it means that they're still running.) Three weeks pass, which JT only knows because the guards said it once, and he _never_ _talks_. He just stops fighting.

Starfleet show up, blazing guns and shining uniforms, and JT doesn't even notice. He takes advantage of the pandemonium and fights back, kicking the chains until they give in at long last, and grabs a phazer and a knife and he _runs_.

He stabs somebody, or maybe four, and blinks at the harsh sunlight. The fighting is dying down.

He runs into Kodos' daughter, Lenore, and tries to shoot her. She tries to shoot him too, so fair's fair. He knows she hates her father, as both her mother and friends were killed in the massacre because Kodos deemed them lesser.

("I don't know where those kids are," she tells him, and he snarls, phazer still pointed at her head. "If I see you again, I'll kill you," he tells her, and she grins. Once upon a time, when JT was Jimmy and Lenore was Lennie, they were classmates and competitive sort-of-friends. "Good to know," she says.)

JT finds a lighter, wonder of wonders, and curdles a flame into existence. He's going to burn this place down. Somewhere else in Kodos' place, Lenore shoots her father three times in the side. She used to love the man. Now? She fires the gun once more for good measure.

* * *

Someone from Starfleet sees him. Another snaps a photo and god, JT hates them. Blood stains his clothes and his hair, he carries a bloody dagger and hatred in his eyes, and they take a photo. Then some Starfleet officer stuns him when he tries to run and he wakes up on a damn ship.

They make him talk to a shrink. (Try to.)

They try to get him to tell them his name. (He doesn't. They already know, anyways.)

They tell him he's thirteen, almost fourteen. (He raises an eyebrow, doesn't care.)

They try to get the other kids they saved to persuade him that they're the good guys. (Lana shuffles meekly into the room, waits for the officer to leave, and then boldly throws her arms around him. She shows him the knives in her boots and grins his wicked smile. Starfleet doesn't know squat, and they've come too late, too late, too late.)

They want him to talk to him mother. (Winona Kirk is busy saving the world, so she thinks. Her son has lost all respect for people like her. In his mind, the world can't be saved... after all, he wasn't.)

They want him to go to a foster home. (JT checks on all the kids he saved, finding them all accounted for, Lana and Thomas and Kevin and Marcus and Flora, and then the second they leave him alone for a minute on earth he runs.)

JT is thirteen and done with adults who try to tell him how to feel and what to think. He knows he can survive. He knows he can run. He's going to do both.

When he turns fourteen he jumps onto a shuttle headed for anywhere and writes a message for Lana. _Don't let go of that knife. I'm gonna miss you, little bird. -JT_

* * *

He's picked up weight but he doesn't forget the hunger. When he passes kids on the street, he doesn't look away. When he's fifteen, he meets a pirate called Cy Sibus. He'd stolen something before they could, some antique gun worth a fortune, and then he was being hauled in before one of the most well-known space pirates of all time. ( _This is it, Jim, this is how it ends,_ he sighs, _no more running._ )

Cy is huge and scary and fierce and has a penchant for picking up strays with potential. (The last part isn't as well known, though.)

"You're not gonna kill me?" Jim asks distrustfully, and Cy beams. His accent is pieced together from slivers of stardust and foreign alien tongues, unfamiliar like a patchwork quilt.

" _Kill_ yeh? _No_!" He smiles wickedly, the look familiar on Jim's own face. "Yeh stole it first, feer and sqeere." He looks Jim up and down thoughtfully. Jim shifts. "How'd yeh like to join me merry crew?" Jim can't believe this is happening.

He shrugs. "Why not?"

* * *

Jim (because it's Jim, now,) is back on a ship but this time he's mostly in control. He could always leave, but he doesn't. Cy is fair, and Jim stays healthy and has everything that he really needs. He's taught where to strike a man so that he'll stay down, where to stab someone so fluidly that the victim himself wouldn't be able to tell.

They teach Jim how to fight like he is an extension of his weapon, not the weapon being an extension of him. (But they're still pirates, and so they don't mind that Jim fights fast and dirty and breath-catchingly _brutal_. They don't question why a fifteen year old has scars on his body that really shouldn't be there. They don't ask why he has such a soft spot for kids, why he can speak five or six different languages fluently and knows enough in numerous others to get by, _(Thanks, Hoshi,)_ Jim thinks, or even why he has such a distrust for Starfleet.)

But most importantly, the pirates teach Jim how to lie. When Kodos had him locked up, Jim never said he didn't know where the kids were. He just wouldn't tell. Cy teaches him how. How to smile, wink, and have nimble fingers. How to let people see only what they want to see. How to beam without joy, how to babble without saying anything at all, how to conceal the truth effortlessly. Jim's a _natural_.

"It's yer blew eyes," Cy grumbled once, "And the darn innecent look about yeh." Jim had smiled like a shark and twirled a knife between his fingers.

* * *

(When he's sixteen, Cy finds Lenore escaping from the jail she'd been locked in for the past four years. She tries to kill Jim, Jim tries to kill her, Cy laughs, and at the end of the day Jim has been assigned as Len's sort-of-mentor; all he has to do is show her around and tell her not to annoy Cy without being killed. It's easier than he thought it would be. They talk about Tarsus IV and agree to start over. Lenore becomes Len. Jim becomes J.)

* * *

When he's seventeen, he gets another offer for an object that Cy has sent him to collect. It's a way better deal, and Jim shrugs and thinks it's probably high time to move on anyways- he's starting to feel a bit at home.

So he double-crosses a notorious pirate and leaves him in a jail, walking easily despite two holes in his shoulders. He knows Cy will get out- the man taught Jim how to escape and Jim's broken out of more prisons than he'd care to count.

He hacks into Starfleet, finds out that little Marcus died from an alien virus a year ago and that fifteen-year-old Flora lost a leg after being attacked by some drunkard back on earth.

* * *

(Len tracks him down and tells him that Cy is furious. Jim doesn't really care.

She lets him go; tells him next time she sees him she'll try to kill him. "Good to know," Jim grins.)

* * *

Jim is nineteen and thinks it would be a miracle if he lives to thirty, as he jumps around space using different aliases and identities, burdened down by nothing and no one. He takes a hundred different odd jobs, a mercenary and a bartender and an engineer and an escape artists and everything in-between.

He has a coffee with Lana, who goes by Lena these days and lives on Vulcan. She's fourteen and lives with Desmia's distant relatives. When she sees him she grins and wraps him in her arms like she used to and Jim laughs for the first time in months.

"You can't keep running forever, Jimmy," she says, because to her Jim will always be JT will always be Jimmy.

Jim leans back in his chair, grins the same way she does. "Watch me."

* * *

Jim is twenty and surprisingly still alive. He hacks into Starfleet again, learns that Thomas went to prison again. Kevin still lives with a foster family. Flora is "quiet" and angry enough to start fires with her eyes alone.

* * *

Twenty-one and Lena ( _Lana_ ,) is off Vulcan, dragging her boyfriend to the stars behind her. She drops of the grid and Jim knows she's fine. She's still got her knives, after all. Kevin and Flora are still in contact. Thomas is breaking out of space jails in his free time. Out of the nine tarsus massacre survivors, (Because there were others, older, who didn't run with Jim. They hid, and they lived,) only six are alive. They've come full-circle.

(Sam is headed towards a farming colony on a new planet, unaware of what happened last time a Kirk had done so. He's married.)

It's the last time Jim will check for a long time.

* * *

Jim turns twenty-two and goes back to earth for the heck of it. He jumps from country to country, seeing the sights, and needs to catch a shuttle backing into the Black from Riverside, Iowa- of all places. He gets in a bar fight and conveniently forgets that on Earth people don't beat each other half to death and laugh it off. He meets Christopher Pike, again, and wonders if the man remembers the little boy from before Tarsus IV.

"I dare you to do better," Pike says, and Jim almost laughs. Hasn't he done enough? But Pike isn't as much a fool as he looks; he knows that Jim wants the name Kirk to mean something other than a man who died twelve-minutes after becoming captain and was christened as a hero. Jim sighs. "Ah, what the hell," he says. "S'not like I've got anything to lose."

There's a part of him that hates Starfleet. (They've taken so much from him, after all.) There's a part of him that wants to make it better. ( _If something's broken, you fix it,_ Aunt Kay said once.)

"Four years? I'll do it in three."

* * *

Years later, after the Academy and Khan and everything in between, the _Enterprise_ is asked to go to Tarsus IV to collect more data about the fungus that devastated the planet and people living there. Kirk gets a strange, blank look and nods before heading off to who-knows-where. Uhura frowned after him but then shrugged and decided to research the planet.

They'd talked about Tarsus in the academy, sure, but even as cadets it was clear that the goriest details were left out. No one even really knew who the Tarsus Nine were or where they were now.

As Uhura read, it got worse and worse. She felt sick. Starfleet had arrived earlier than they'd though they'd be able to, but it was still too late. The crops had been dying out long before crazy Kodos the Executioner massacred 4000 people.

Someone had had a camera when they "liberated" the planet, and Uhura stared in disgust and a morbid fascination.

The yellow and red grasses were dead and dry, fields full of it. The trees were reaching and leafless, eerie and quiet. Houses were abandoned, doors unhinged or swinging limply. Blood stained the streets. And a picture of a boy. The title was simple; _Unknown_ _Tarsus Massacre Survivor._

The image itself, however, is anything but clinical. A boy with dirty blonde hair to his shoulders, blood smeared on his forehead and matted in his hair. His clothes are tattered and his body is awfully thin, but he grips a bloody, curved knife in one hand and the other is curled into a fist. Blood runs thickly down his wrists, as if he'd been chained. His jaw is set and lips curled slightly.

It's the eyes, though, that make the picture. They're sunken and shadowed but stand out immeasurably, such a vibrant blue that they seem out of place. They're a bit glassy, as if the boy, who looks to be about thirteen, is moving methodically, detached. He looks lifeless, but at the same time so, _so_ angry.

 _Why did you let this happen,_ his eyes scream. _How dare you say you're saving us._

And then Uhura suddenly reels a bit, because she knows those eyes.

She saw them less than fifteen minutes ago as they hurried off the bridge.


End file.
